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Here’s How Beer Helped Save a Monastery in California

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VINA, Calif. (TheBlaze/AP) — Monks in a small Northern California town are rebuilding a centuries-old Spanish monastery with help from what may seem an unlikely source: beer.

Funds to save the monastery were in part raised in partnership with Sierra Nevada, which sold this specially themed beer. (Photo: Wikimedia)

The first phase of the building’s decades-long restoration project in the Sacramento Valley town of Vina has been completed, with the Chapter House of Ovila now standing, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday.

In the 1930s, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst bought the former Trappist monastery- the Santa Maria de Ovila – and imported it from Spain for an estate that was never realized. He had planned to use parts of the church for an indoor swimming pool changing room.

Here’s a look at the cloister dismantled in the 1930s. (Image: Wikimedia)

Once that project was scrapped, Hearst donated the monastery’s pieces to the city of San Francisco, but the dismantled building sat forgotten in Golden Gate Park for more than 60 years.

The Vina monks credit the founder of their abbey, Father Thomas X. Davis, with the idea of restoring the remains to the Trappist community. Davis saw the stones at Golden Gate Park when he arrived in San Francisco in 1955 and began a campaign to bring them to Vina.

Stones from the monastery in Golden Gate Park. (Photo: Wikimedia)

The city eventually agreed to turn over the stones to the abbey. The Chapter House was rebuilt with the help of millions of dollars raised by the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in nearby Chico.

The brewers created a series of Ovila Abbey ales inspired by Belgian Trappist monks, an order that to this day makes some of the finest beers in the world. Here’s more about the ales from Sierra Nevada’s website:

OvilaAbbey Ales are a series of Belgian-inspired beers brewed in collaboration with the monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, CA. An homage to the time-honored monastic brewing tradition, Ovila Abbey Ales combine the quality and craft of those dedicated artisans with a dose of American brewing innovation. Featuring ingredients grown by the monks on the grounds of the abbey, Ovila Abbey Ales are a fresh twist on the ancient brewing tradition.

Monasteries in Europe still use brewing as a way to keep them financially self-sufficient, so Sierra Nevada’s partnership with the Vina monastery is keeping with a tradition that began in the Middle Ages.

Sierra Nevada Brewing and the monks have raised $7 million over the past 12 years to help with the historic and painstaking reconstruction.

The gothic, limestone building that housed Cistercian monks for hundreds of years is finally erect again.

The Chapter house rebuilt. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Still, Father Paul Mark Schwan said another $2 million is needed to finish the project: the building is still without the proper window glass, floors and electricity needed to finish it.

“Will it take another 12 years?” Schwan told the paper. “I prefer it not.”

Read more details about saving the structure in the San Francisco Chronicle’s full article here.